"I Could Be Magical"

Young Adult Genre Fiction's Role in Empowerment and Identity

Maria

Young adult literature enjoys widespread popularity. They are often the most successful book in economic terms, the crowning achievement of which is, of course, the Harry Potter series. While it is treated as a second-class form of literature (not appropriate for "adults;" it's right there in the name), it is beloved by many. It can serve as a gateway to more complex literature, and it can entice readers who might not otherwise pick up a book. But if a recent article from Slate.com is any indication, there is still considerable prejudice against these books. The idea that someone should be ashamed of indulging in books in their free time apparently lives on after we all leave high school. How could we forget that reading (at least the wrong thing) is uncool, and that we should strive for acceptance from our peers? If this is how we treat adults who read for pleasure, teens must be all the more troubled, as their English classes and the adult world expect them to put away childish things and move onto "adult" reading. This attitude reinforces the adolescent fear: reading can make you an outcast.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe it is no coincidence that YA fiction is labeled "escapism." Maybe being an outcast can make you a reader.

In the case of Maria, reading was a means of escape. Maria is a 26-year-old woman who is from a traditional Mexican family in Fort Collins, Colorado. Today, she is the first person in her family to go to college, and one of the few that reads for fun. She thinks those two traits are likely connected. Maria has loved reading since the second grade: "I was good at [reading]. I was better at it than anyone in my family. So it became my thing. It still is my thing." She believes that this passion for reading has enabled her to be academically successful today. Her favorite stories to read are young adult fantasy novels, and she traces the roots of this passion all the way back to the first Harry Potter book she read in fifth grade. For her, those books were something special. They weren't just a means of entertainment, they showed her a very special kind of escapism: "other ways of living."

If young adult literature can turn a girl into the only reader in her family, set her on the path to be the first college graduate in her family, and show her "other ways of living," then these books should be highly valued and respected. "Escapism" is often a considered a vice, something for people who lack the will or skills to handle reality. For Maria, young adult books were a means of escape. They were not only an escape from her loneliness as a teenager, they may well have given her a means to escape the cycle of poverty. This escapism should be highly prized, as should the literature that enabled it. To learn more about how reading young adult fiction influenced her life, I sat down with Maria to ask her some questions.

Paul: How would you say you first got hooked on reading?

Maria:

My second grade teacher really helped me learn to love to read. That was one of the things she really helped me with. But my fifth grade teacher really helped me learn how to love fantasy, I guess. He really got me into the genre. He read the first Harry Potter book to us in class. I told him that I had the collection of the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series, but I was missing one of them, I was missing the Magician’s Nephew. He asked me if I liked them, and I told him I did enjoy them. The next day, when I came to class, there was a copy of the Magician’s Nephew on my desk.

He really encouraged my reading in that sense. He asked me questions about what I was reading, he was engaged, and, I mean, he gave me a book. He encouraged me in that way. My family wasn’t very affluent. When I got books it was usually from the library or for Christmas. Before that, I read strictly non-fiction and science a little bit. The science we were learning in elementary school was pretty basic. I remember liking to read about space and the forest. I really liked the forests. And then with my fifth grade teacher, he really helped me with knowing I could like things other than reading about normal or real things.

Paul: You emphasize the importance of fantasy. Do you think that genre was more successful at turning you into a reader than, say, realism would have been?

Maria (audio recording provided above):

Definitely. I feel like Harry Potter has a lot of strong female characters, and that was something I was lacking in my life. I may not have been very openly saying "I’m totally a wizard" or those type of things, but seeing a character like reading as much as I did really helped. Like Matilda, who I really related to because she also liked to read a lot and she was also magical. So I guess thinking that I could be magical in some way helped, too. You know, magic is where you make the impossible possible. I think a lot of people in lower income families and in poverty don’t have that as a view; they don’t get to see that any other way. These things that are impossible can’t be possible. I guess it’s just a different way of looking at life.

For me personally, I like to read for enjoyment, so I read stories with happy endings, which I know is not at all realistic. But like I said, I was surrounded by misery. The last things I wanted to read about was someone having an okay life and having something work out for them, only to have it ripped away from them in the end. Many realistic stories, that I’ve read anyway, have always ended up with misery. For me, I don’t think realistic stories would have been effective at all. It would have just reinforced what I was seeing, and therefore I would have been like: "there’s no point. I can’t fight this. Everyone struggles. There’s no point in fighting what I’m seeing now because even the books tell me that this is it; this is how shitty life can be."

Maria (recording above):

I grew up in a very poor town, too. My family was very poor all the time. So what I saw more often than not was the women dropping out of high school and having children before they were 20 years old. I think everyone in my family has had a child before they were 23. And that goes for male and female. That’s what I expected. I kind of expected I would end up getting married, having three or four kids, and I was even expecting to be married to a man I may not even like. There was a lot of unhappiness that was surrounding me.

In Harry Potter, particularly with Hermione, really showed me that I could be smart and I could go places. That I could do things and I was capable of being something more than just a wife or a mother. Not that those are bad things, but in my family it seemed more of a prison for my family, that these women were being just wives and just mothers. It wasn’t anything redeeming; quality of life for them wasn’t that great and I didn’t want that. And that’s where Harry Potter encouraged me to imagine myself in these different roles, imagine myself in these different times, which encouraged me to look for different options.

Paul: There is criticism of young adult literature out there that it features primarily white, middle class characters. Was that ever an issue for you? Did that make it any harder for you to have that escape or to associate yourself with those characters?

Maria:

No, I don’t think so. I honestly can’t say that it would have made a difference. If it was the same story - the story of the kid who lived under the stairs who lost his parents and had these awesome friends - his race wouldn’t have mattered. I can’t recalls ever being upset that Hermione was white instead of black, or that none of them were ever Hispanic. That really didn’t bother me at all, because it was my story, my journey. I also just didn’t care about race. It was something that I either subconsciously tried to avoid as much as possible, or it’s something I didn’t care about. Whereas some people it could be a factor, like my family really cared about what color of friends I had. I didn’t care.

I would make up scenarios in my head. I often pretended I was a witch or a wizard in Harry Potter, specifically in Harry Potter as myself, not has Harry or Hermione. It was always me in their world somehow. It didn’t even matter. I could still be with my family, but I was still a special person in that world. It was so easy to see myself as someone else or see myself in a role I wouldn’t otherwise be able to be in.

Maybe race didn't matter because I was already ostracized in my own family, in my own culture. I felt like I wasn’t really part of the culture. Maybe that had a factor in how I saw these character? Race didn’t matter, because apparently to me it was just another person. My biggest bullies were my family. They made me feel like more of an outsider than race in these books did.

Paul: Your sisters would have gone through many of the same situations as you did. Why do you think they didn't end up being as much of readers as you are?

Maria:

We had different teachers, and we went to different schools. We went to the same
elementary school, but we went to different junior highs and high schools. I went to CLP (Cache La Poudre Junior High) and both my sisters went to Lincoln Junior High. I went to Rocky and they went to Poudre and Fort Collins High School.

And we had different friends. That probably had the biggest influence. The friends I had in high school and junior high read the same books I did, so we were able to read them and discuss them and just talk about these characters and stories. My sister had their gangster friends, their cholo friends, they were always being threatened or getting into fights. They were doing the expected things of a teenager, and I was doing the atypical thing for a teenager. I may not have been a good student in high school, but other than that I was diligent and I followed the rules more often than not.

I think they were happy with where they were at and who they were, and I wasn’t. I think that’s the biggest influence with why I read so much. I needed to see the different options, I needed that escape, I needed that different reality and to portray that different role, even if it was just through reading. So they were content with where they were at and who they were and what they were expected to do. I think that was the biggest difference.

Paul: If race wasn't really a problem for you and your imaginings, do you still think it is a problem that should be address, or should be changed, in young adult literature?

Maria:

It does really suck that the only books where the characters are non-white are realistic situations, like where a family member is a gang member and being prosecuted, or a family in poverty who is just trying to get out ahead. I think it’s a very self-fulfilling prophecy. They’re not only told they’re hopeless from the rest of the world outside of them, they’re also being told they’re hopeless by the characters they’re reading about. I feel like a lot of students who do read for pleasure do it because they are trying to get away. It’s not just because they feel like reading. It’s because they need somewhere to go to that’s different from where they’re at. So, I do believe there is a need to have these different options, to have more non-white characters in the lead that are in the more magical or more powerful situations, where it’s not so hopeless.

Those are the only options we have: be hopeless or be alienated from our culture. Recently with the Coke commercial, people were singing "American the Beautiful" in different languages and celebrating American culture, and people were getting mad about that, even in my classes now. The girl next to me said "They’re in America, they should learn English." I just said "I think it was a really powerful commercial. It made me feel proud to be American and Mexican." I think we need those kind of things, to make us feel proud of our dual identities. We shouldn’t have to be just one or the other. Like Part-Time Indian: he had to really struggle with his dual identity. And he, in the end, didn't really choose his tribe. He had to kind of choose the white people. That's because he was in a situation where if he chose both to be proud of, neither was going to accept him. He couldn't be both an American and a Native American. I feel like a lot of people are in that position; they can’t just be both American and Puerto Rican, even though it’s a U.S. territory. They have to be just American or just Puerto Rican. It sucks. I think we should encourage more dual and multiple identities. In the end, it’s impossible to have just one identity.

Paul: Wouldn't it be nice if that was coming from someone beside a company that's just trying to sell you a drink?

Maria:

How the message gets out there doesn’t matter; it’s the message that’s important. I didn’t see it as a Coke thing, I saw it as an American thing. This is how we should all feel. This is how we should all be. This is what American should be.

Maria's story certainly hasn't always been been a happy one, but for who she is today the value of reading cannot be overlooked. While race may not have stopped her from escaping into books, she had to step beyond realism to find hope. I don't think we can say that need solely arises from the limited representation of people of color in young adult literature, but when her choices are so limited and when "realistic" stories about people of color surround almost exclusively sports, poverty, and gangs, then a reader is left with few options.

People like the author of the Slate article also criticize YA fiction for the unrealistically happy endings, but if we can't make the case to students that reading can be enjoyable, we will have little hope of keeping them reading. More importantly, people like Maria can find comfort and hope in stories that have happy endings. Literature has an incredible power to take on complex and morally ambiguous issues in an engaging way, but giving pleasure, hope, and "other ways of living" to people stuck in unhappy situations is at least as valuable. What is truly embarrassing is to tell those people that they can only have a happy ending in something that is unrealistic. But if we only allow happy endings to exist in fantasy, we should encourage students to seek out these stories and enjoy them. We should strive to remove limitations from students' imaginations and enable them to really see all the possible ways of living by populating stories with more diverse characters or by supporting the reading of genre fiction. These stories can truly make the impossible seem possible, and let all of these students know what it's like to be at least a little bit magical.